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Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Western Shale's North American Shale Plays Conference, Denver, January 11 -13, 2012

The Emerging North American Shale Plays, the 2012 edition of Western Shale 2011 conference, is scheduled for January 11 - 13, 2012, in Denver, Colorado.

The conference will bring together geologists, E&P companies, field service companies, infrastructure providers, investors, consultants, government officials and environmental & permitting experts, lawyers, land owners and brokers, and other oil and gas experts. This event is tailored for those, who are looking for solid information in order to make sophisticated investment and strategic decisions to profit from emerging oil and gas plays across North America.

According to the one-page notice, the emerging North American shale plays include: the Niobrara, the Appalachian shale, the California shale, the Texas shale (presumably the Eagle Ford), Canadian shale, and New Stealth.

Welcome to America’s newest “stealth” shale play. Encore reported that it has been amassing, over the past two years, a large acreage position in southern Mississippi and the Florida parishes of Louisiana. The company now holds a hefty 208,000 net acres in this emerging play. Here’s perhaps the most intriguing part – it’s oil, not gas. To be clear, the play is not entirely unknown – as early as 1997, an article published in the Houston Geological Society Bulletin by professors at Louisiana State University estimated resource potential to be a colossal 7 billion barrels (42 Tcfe). However, to our knowledge Encore is the only public E&P company to actually drill in this play in recent times, and initial results are encouraging.

The company has drilled two horizontal wells here thus far. The first, drilled out 1,500 feet, has been producing continually for the past seven days at a rate of 150 to 200 bpd. The second, drilled out 3,100 feet, was recently completed, and the company is awaiting production results. Our initial take is that this play could look tantalizingly like the Bakken, though of course we want to make it very clear that results here are extremely early, and economics are not yet established. Encore, of course, is a major player in the Bakken itself, with 178,000 net acres, but the company’s acreage in the Tuscaloosa play is even larger.